L'Éducation Morale

French sociologist Émile Durkheim, born in 1858 and deceased in 1917, was a keen observer of the upheavals of his time. He believed that only science and a new rationalism could explain and point the way to the complex issues of a changing world. A proponent of socialist ideas, he was interested in pointing out ways out of the crisis, starting from the observation not of individuals, but of social phenomena as social facts, within a framework of defined social species (the nation, the religious or political group). A social fact would be any way of acting, fixed or not, extensible to an entire society or capable of exerting external pressure on the individual. According to Durkheim, the social fact has an existence of its own that transcends its individual manifestations. Defending a new scientific discipline whose legitimacy was questioned by many of his university colleagues, Durkheim waged a struggle in academic circles that was not easy but which placed him in history as one of the "founding fathers" of Sociology. Émile Durkheim remains a relevant phenomenon today due to the influence he continues to exert. He distinguished two types of society: those of mechanical solidarity and those of organic solidarity, justifying the transition from one to the other by social causes. The social order found in primitive societies is based on mechanical solidarity, which relies on a community of beliefs and the intensity of consensus expressed in the collective consciousness. Industrialization, urbanization, and the division of labor destroyed this moral integration but gave rise to a social order based on organic solidarity. This is relevant to the differences, not the similarities, between individuals, allowing them greater freedom from external control but making them much more dependent on each other precisely because of their differentiation. Another concept of great importance in his work is that of anomie: societies may find themselves unable to integrate certain individuals who are distant from them due to the weakening of the collective consciousness. Durkheim notably used this concept to classify types of suicide: altruistic suicide, egoistic suicide, and anomic suicide. In the realm of religions, Durkheim was concerned with understanding the universal functions of religious systems in the continuity of society as such. In his successful attempt to give consistency to Sociology as a science, he defined several principles, among which: rejection of "spontaneous sociology"; constitution of a proper domain for sociology, which would be that of the "social fact"; use of objective methods; the search for causes and only secondarily for functions (because knowing what an element serves does not elucidate its causes or what it is); and diagnosis of phenomena as belonging to the normal or the pathological. Durkheim's influences are found in the intellectual tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte. At the École Normale Supérieure, he was a student of Fustel de Coulanges and Émile Boutroux and a colleague of Henri Bergson, Jean Jaurès, Pierre Janet, and Goblot.